Rukmini critically surveyed herself in the cracked mirror. She turned her now heavy jaw side to side and took her sari pallu and wiped off the excess talcum powder of her face. Her wrinkles didn’t let her enjoy talcum powder like before. It seeped into the fine crevices and made her look like a Cūṉiyakkāri, or a witch like her Amma would say. She smiled thinking of her Amma. Strong and built like a tree, there was nothing her Amma couldn’t do. Her face would always be puffed and soft to touch, thanks to the clouds of steam that would always accompany her wherever she went. Like an angel would never be seen without her halo, her amma seemed to leave a trail of steam behind her everywhere. Amma made thousands of idlis in her dinghy kitchen at 4 am every day and sold them on the streets and brought home bread for her family of six. Amma always said a woman should have labour running in her veins like blood. Men had it easy, they don’t even have to bend to piss, she would cackle. Amma might have been a miser but she still bought Ruki three new saris, when she got her married at the age of fourteen.
Ruki, round faced and young entered her husband’s house with trepidation and excitement. She slowly learnt the hard way that her Amma had always been right. The whole day involved toil like Ruki had never experienced before. From scrubbing every inch of their one room hut, to cooking six meals for her pot-bellied husband, Ruki would have embraced this life gracefully had her husband been a little more accommodating. Shyam bluntly put was a brute. All of 27, his previous wife had succumbed to a nasty fall in the bathroom, and the whole of neighbourhood suspected Shyam of having clubbed her skull instead. After all he was a brutal wife beater. Ruki spent most of her life dodging punches and in a short while could start predicting where the blows would be aimed. Shyam treated wife beating like a science. A wife had to be beaten twice a day to be reminded of her place, he would boast to his clan of drunken posse in the local watering den. It was all injuries and sunshine, till Shyam kicked Ruki right in the belly on her second trimester. Ruki lost her baby then promptly lost the next three. But karma does take a full circle, Shyam one late night in his drunk stupor got under a speeding tempo and resigned himself to being in bed for the rest of his life, not that he was very productive before. But for Ruki, her labour only increased. From changing his bed pan to wiping his mouth after his six meals of watery khichdi. A woman doesn’t get a moment’s rest, her Amma’s voice would echo in their one room establishment as Ruki went about her chores.
Today she was 57, partially blind in one eye but her sunny disposition still intact. Her achey joints meant less commitment to her love of labour. She let the dust settle on the window panes, the bed sheets went a couple of extra days without being washed and she let the cobwebs remained on the ceiling. Shyam on the other hand never changed. Invalids might not be able to move much, but they can sure be a nuisance if they want to be. Shyam even from a bed had managed to vex Ruki all these years. Scoffing at her cooking, dirtying the bed constantly, he derived a special joy in propping his weak arm against his unsteady catheter stand and making it propel down. Today, as she wrapped her faded but crisp red cotton sari around her, she smiled into the mirror, she was going to her neighbour’s baby’s Annaprashna ceremony. She liked babies, they cooed and smiled and all the labour spend behind looking for them was worth it. As she walked through the door, Shyam had spied his wife preening at the mirror. He rocked his catheter stand again and made it topple of as usual. The bag burst on reaching the ground and the ammonia hit the air around them and the urine splashed Ruki’s sari. She looked at the floor as the puddle enveloped her feet. She remembered her Amma’s words again, ‘Men don’t even have to bend to piss’. She staggered towards Shyam’s cot and grasped her now damp pallu. Almost in a trance, she wrapped the pallu around her husband’s neck and pulled it tighter and tighter, washing her husband useless limbs struggle to move. She used all her upper body strength to squeeze all Shyam’s last breath from his body and his face turned purple. He was soon immobile and lifeless on his cot. She released her now crushed pallu. Her pallu had ended her 43 years of labour.
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